Monday, April 28, 2008

Lost Cellphone

Drop an iPhone somewhere. Whenever the accelerometer reads motion, have it record video and send it back to a server wirelessly. Create a collection of "found cell phone" footage, of people discovering the cell phone and deciding what to do next.

Inspired by the U.Frame Festival category, "Light Media (films made with mobile phones)".

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Awareness and Art

In the last century a tradition has developed that places awareness at the center of art. One of my favorite realizations of this idea comes from John Cage's famous "silent piece"/4'33": the music consists of any sound the audience is aware of. Surely this can be expanded into other forms:

  • Music is awareness of sound
  • Sculpture is awareness of physical form
  • Dance is awareness of movement
  • Poetry is awareness of language
  • Architecture is awareness of space (from Caitlin)
  • And by "is", I should say "requires", as it is possible to have awareness without art, but not art without awareness. And, perhaps, the only distinction between these two cases is the label applied to that which one is aware of (whether it is classified as/connected to other things called "art"). I can imagine "beauty" working the same way: requiring awareness (and perhaps, the label "art"), but then being nothing more than an additional label.

    Saturday, April 05, 2008

    Lost Cat

    Do this on purpose, extrapolate:

    Monday, March 10, 2008

    If You Seek...

    I imagine a conceptual piece that is performed "in a purely electronic space" (a la Chris Mann's "Dectalker"), where a script continually sounds out requests to random servers for information that may or may not exist.

    Sunday, March 09, 2008

    Two Pieces for Voice

    1. Find the loudest sound you can, and try to overpower it.
    2. Find the quietest sound you can, and try to underpower it.

    Wednesday, March 05, 2008

    Meta-Games

    A friend of mine was incredibly bored during a critique/review session a few days ago and started drawing transitional shapes. Starting with a circle, she would slowly sharpen four points into a square, drawing each iteration from left to right. A friend joined in and made it into a challenge by drawing the beginning and ending forms and having her fill in the middle.

    She shared this with me later that day while I was doing some musical improvisation with two other people. A corresponding musical game was obvious: one of us produced the initial sound, another the final sound, and the third the inbetween sound.

    Today, the same friend sent me a poem playing with words. There was a clear connection between adjacent words: teach, tech, mech, etc. Sometimes the connection was orthographic, sometimes phonetic. Later, she framed it as a challenge: "get from 'potter' to 'u'".

    While the game itself ("The Inbetween Game") is wonderful, what's most interesting to me here is the idea of a generic game form: the same basic principle being applied to multiple domains (drawing, music, language). Can we abstract other games into generic forms that describe game-families? Meta-games?

    Tuesday, March 04, 2008

    7 Songs to Listen to Instead of 4'33"

    1. "Daleko stąd" by Kanał Audytywny
    2. "Stare at the Sun" by MuteMath
    3. "Rock N' Roll (Could Never Hip Hop Like This)" by Handsome Boy Modeling School
    4. "The Loneliness of a Middle Distance Runner" by Belle & Sebastian
    5. "I Never Said I Loved You" by Kaki King
    6. "Dreams in Reality" by Sometime
    7. "Aero Deck" by Oval